Are your employees wasting your bandwidth?

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Recent studies demonstrate that upwards of 25% of Internet bandwidth in an office are consumed by employees misusing the internet. According to Gartner, the average growth of business email volume is 30% annually, with the average size of the email content growing in parallel. Add to this the growth of Web misuse from streaming media, downloads, file sharing, social networking, and spam, and it becomes pretty clear that the mismanaged cost to business of non-work-related Internet use is already bad and getting worse.

Studies and surveys such as these typically focus only on lost productivity — and there’s no doubt that’s bad enough. But they rarely discuss the significant hidden financial impact of bandwidth wastage from these activities.

We have started to take bandwidth for granted as it’s become cheaper and more readily available. However, as the adoption of cloud-based solutions (like customer relations management tools) increases, it will be critical to ensure the user has a good experience with Web-based applications, with the speed of their ability to work unimpeded by bandwidth grabbers and slowdowns.

Social networkers are as much to blame as habitual gamers, sports fans, or file sharers: After ‘posting messages,’ the next two most common social network activities are uploading and downloading music and video content. Overall top bandwidth hogs reported include employees sending emails with large attachments, recreational Web surfing, listening to the radio over the Internet, music downloads, and streaming video over the Internet.

One rogue user in an office streaming large files can impact everyone else trying to work. Clearly, there’s a need to manage individual users’ bandwidth usage.

Perhaps by taking simple steps, such as giving users bandwidth allowances, admins can control the abuse. By blocking streaming media, allowing users to go to sites but without the ability to see streamed videos, bandwidth usage can be reduced dramatically. It may also be possible to block the downloads of certain file types or MIME types, such as Flash Video .flv files, unless the user has a legitimate business reason to view them. And blocking some MIME types can even help prevent users being bamboozled into infecting their own computers by malicious advertisements.

By using Software-as-a-Service Web filtering, other unique advantages can now be brought into play. For example, bandwidth compression of all traffic from the cloud to your users browsers, and even the ability to block Web ads at the gateway, may conserve this precious resource. Over time, simple measures such as these can conserve a large amount of bandwidth.

While we all appreciate the privilege of using the Internet for personal purposes at work, a small number of rotten apples on your network can truly ruin the whole bunch. Draconian measures are sure to hurt morale, so it’s a bit of a balancing act to find the right mix of measures that work. As the growth of cloud applications and hosted services continues, it will be more important than ever to keep these bandwidth hogs in check, lest the rest of the company suffer.

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About the author

Ian Moyse has over 25 years of experience in the IT Sector, with nine of these specialising in security and over 23 years of channel experience. Starting as a Systems Programmer at IBM in the mainframe environment, he has held senior positions in both large and smaller organisations including Senior Vice President for EMEA at CA and Managing Director of several UK companies. For the last seven years he has been focused in Cloud Computing and has become a thought leader in this arena. From 2015-2017, Ian was named by Onalytica as the #1 influencer on cloud in social media.
Moyse has been keynote speaker at many events and runs one of the largest Sales Groups worldwide on LinkedIn. He sat on the board of Eurocloud UK and remains on the Governance Board of the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) and a board advisor to FAST (Federation Against Software Theft). Named in multiiple industry 'Top Cloud Bloggers'l lists, he has been called upon as a Cloud Social influencer and Blogger by Oracle, Sage, SAP, Equinix, Maxiser, Acquia and more.
Moyse was awarded Sales Director of the Year by industry body BESMA (ISM) following accolades of global ‘AllBusiness Sales AllStar Award for 2010’ and The ‘European Channel Personality of the Year Award for 2011’ and was named by TalkinCloud as one of the global top 200 cloud channel experts in 2011 and listed on the MSPMentor top 250 list for 2011 which tracks the world's top managed services experts, entrepreneurs and executives. He has also recently been awarded the accolade of Channelnomics 2011 Influencer of the year for Europe. In early 2012 Ian was the first in the UK to pass the CompTIA Cloud Essentials specialty certification exam, was appointed as a Thought Leader to Compare The Cloud and was listed in the worldwide SMB Nation 150 Channel Influencers list.
For those wishing to connect my linkedin profile is at www.ianmoyse.co.uk and I can be followed on Twitter at @imoyse</p>

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